August Madness

Fill our your brackets! Which school will be the last to go fully online?

I am laughing to keep from crying. It's always been an important survival skill for me.

Also, I wish I had thought of this particular piece of snark.

(Tip of the cap to Barry Wellman.)

Data Analysis of Exuberant and Uncouth College Fight Songs

Fivethirtyeight.com did some data analysis of college fight songs.

UCLA's fight song is apparently called "Sons of Westwood" (ugh).

How can they write such an article without mentioning Tom Lehrer?

Trying to Trademark the Word "The"

THE Ohio State University is apparently trying to trademark the word "the". Oy vey.

I love University of Michigan's response on Twitter.

™ pic.twitter.com/bx2vTBUtst

— University of Michigan (@UMich) August 14, 2019

Grilling a Lawmaker About his Degrees

Once again, truth is stranger than fiction. Check out this story.

After proposing party affiliation quotas for faculty, lawmaker grilled about business degree from Sizzler Steakhouse https://t.co/9ycYTISAm1

— Carl T. Bergstrom (@CT_Bergstrom) March 3, 2017

In his tweet, Carl Bergstrom links to a Boing Boing article, but the article to which it links gives a clearer explanation.

It's not quite as surreal as a National Park Service Twitter account going rogue (initially by simply tweeting basic facts about climate science), but it's still odd.

A Useful Blog Entry About Interviewing for Faculty Jobs

This blog entry is a useful resource for people interviewing for faculty jobs (or who have members or alums from their groups interviewing for such jobs).

It is written within a specific context, but it includes points that apply much more generally.

Some of the links therein also look potentially useful.

(Tip of the cap to Meghan Duffy.)

Overly Honest Slogans For University Majors

These overly honest slogans for university majors are bloody awesome!

It's tough to pick a favorite, but right now I think the one for communications is perhaps the funniest. We'll have to make our own for mathematics, which didn't make the cut for this article.

I know I've seen a bunch of these before, so I also wonder if I have seen (or even posted on my blog?) this exact list before?

(Tip of the cap to George Takei.)

"College is Not a Commodity. Stop Treating it Like One."

Former Cornell University president Hunter Rawlings has written a brilliant essay called "College is not a commodity. Stop treating it like one." about what the role of universities (and professors) and, especially, students play in getting the most out of the experience of going to university --- about what it really means to get an education. I can't make the points any better then he did, so I'll simply express my heartfelt agreement and encourage you to read the short essay.

As an additional brief note, it is my role as a professor (and College tutor) to try to put my students in what I think is the best position for them to succeed. This need not be --- and reasonably often is not --- the same as what they think is the best position for them to succeed.

(Tip of the cap to Aaron Clauset.)

University "Burger Joint" Conversations

Here's some very old-school humor...

Spending a couple days near Brown has made me think of the old college stereotype bit in this link (because I now have a better understanding of where Brown's came from).

I last read this when I was still an undergraduate student at Caltech in the mid-late 1990s (and when such things were still typically passed around by e-mail).

And the Caltech one is also spot-on. :)

Achievement Unlocked: Break Expedia's Shortest-Path Algorithm

No, Expedia, if I try to go between Ithaca and Newark with stops first to Philadelphia and then to Boston, it is not ok to insist that I do Ithaca->Newark->other city->Philadelphia when I try to go directly from Ithaca to Philly.

Actually, there was additional shortest-path failing besides that (like insisting that particular direct flights that exist for some searches don't exist for others).

Expedia really needs to hire some graph theorists!

After several failed attempts and significant frustration, I basically went and bought the tickets I wanted with Orbitz instead.

Anyway, this is what I get for trying to arrange an SFO -> Clarkson -> Cornell -> Rutgers -> SFO trip, because all three of those colleges are in the middle of bloody nowhere, except with slightly different nowheres. (That said, I am very excited about this academic trip. I will visit collaborators at Clarkson, I will be starting at a collaboration at Rutgers, and I will be visiting Cornell for the first time since I left when I graduated and will be giving a talk in the colloquium for the program from which I graduated. Awesome!)

MIT Entrance Exam from 1869-70

Here is MIT's entrance exam from 1869-70. How well would you have done?

(Tip of the cap to Tim Chartier.)

What happens in Tempe stays in Tempe

I am heading off to Arizona State for a whirlwind tour: 2 days on campus, 3 talks, 3 different topics. And do you know how I'm going to prepare for this? By going to tonight's Dodger game, of course!

I didn't see any baseball game in person in 2009 (for the first time in maybe 25 years), and I am going to make up for this!

Ranking universities using polytopes

Courtesy Peter Mucha, here is an article in Science News covering a new arXiv paper by Peter Huggins and Lior Pachter that uses polytopes to examine the US News and World Report rankings of US universities. (Some of you may be aware that Lior Pachter is yet another Techer. He was a Rudd, who I believe graduated in 1994. He's currently on the faculty at UC Berkeley and is one of the pioneers in the new field of "applied algebraic statistics." Actually, algebraic statistics is pretty much a new field of mathematics even before one considers applications.)

One of the ideas I've been bouncing around for several years is the idea of using network science to rank universities. One of these days I'll do that... (My current ranking system project, by the way, involves ranking baseball players using the bipartite graph of pitcher-batter interactions. My collaborators and I don't have any results yet, but stay tuned...)